Maddie Davis is a co-founder of Enlightened-Digital and tech-obsessed female from the Big Apple. She lives by building and redesigning websites, running marathons, and reading anything and everything on the NYT Best Sellers list.

Times are changing and that includes the way we’re searching for products online. As technology becomes more accessible and traditional tasks are reinvented for greater convenience, consumers are choosing to use voice for their queries and questions over traditional text-based searches. To remain successful in e-commerce, brands must adapt to meet these new demands. Here are a couple quick tips to get you to get started.
Putting your brand at the forefront of voice search results requires a new strategy than in years past. As more and more voice-activated devices hit the market, voice technology is continuing to mature and therefore alter how queries are interpreted by search engines. Achieving a strong placement in voice search results begins with understanding just how these searches are formatted.

For the simple fact that people speak differently than they type, it’s important to consider the variances between forming a typed query and a spoken one. “When people use voice search, it’s only logical to assume that they enter a query similar to how they speak in real life—typing requires more time, thus, we shorten our queries to the very minimum, whereas speaking doesn’t require much effort,” says SEMrush Content Producer and PR Manager Meri Chobanyan. This assumption is the key reasoning for adjusting your content to answer consumers questions, rather than just focusing on keywords or phrases. According to seoClarity, incorporating trigger words such as “how,” “what,” and “best” into your content is best for meeting these requirements, as is mixing up terminology to cover all potential ways of phrasing a question.

When in doubt, always revert to the most natural form of speech for voice search. Keeping in mind 41 percent of people who own a voice-activated speaker say it feels like talking to a friend or another person, you create content that can satisfy queries of the most relevant, natural phrasing.

Going beyond how people are searching, fully optimizing your site for voice search means being aware of what people are searching for. Research shows, 75 percent of smart speaker owners perform searches for local businesses on a weekly basis and up to 53 percent say they perform these searches every day. These numbers increase the importance of optimizing your site for the thousands of people searching each day.

To fully capitalize on the demand for local results, crafting web content that covers the entirety of your product or service offering is essential. Focusing on long-tail keywords that can answer localized search queries such as ‘where can I find art supplies in Portland?’ is especially important for local retailers. Should a Portland art store include the phrase ‘find art supplies in Portland’ in their web content, the chances of them claiming a top spot in this localized voice search greatly increases?

2020 is the projected year for voice search to fully take over text. In the time leading up until then, the competition for good placements is only going to increase. To best serve your customers in this sense, It’s important to figure out what works best for your business, simplify usability on your platform with tools like CS-Cart, and stay up to date on the latest in search trends and technology. Fully optimizing for voice search is certainly going to be an ongoing process with lots of trial and error, however, we hope this information helps in your preparation.

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Laura Gayle is a full-time blogger who has ghostwritten more than 350 articles for major software companies, tech startups, and online retailers. Founder of www.BusinessWomanGuide.org, she created her site to be a trusted resource for women trying to start or grow businesses on their own terms. She has written about everything from crowdfunding and inventory management to product launches, cybersecurity trends, web analytics, and innovations in digital marketing.

E-commerce opens up exciting profit opportunities for most retail businesses. Your customer base can multiply exponentially, there is unlimited space on your virtual shelves to display merchandise, and you can have 24/7 store hours. But as with most things, there are some drawbacks to tackle as well.

One of the biggest headaches for e-commerce businesses is product returns. The wrong size, color, model, damage in transit, or any combination of the above could be potential culprits. The return rate for online purchases is more than double that of brick-and-mortar stores with upwards of 30 percent of items being sent back. Returns can cut into retailers’ profits substantially, with added shipping costs, labor, and lost sales. Fortunately, there are some effective ways to limit the boomerang effect and decrease the amount of shipped merchandise that comes back.

1) It is All in the Details

Analysts estimate as much as 54 percent of all e-commerce returns are due to sizing or color issues. Online retailers can minimize this by carefully crafting detailed product descriptions which include everything the customer needs to make an informed purchase. Use sophisticated shopping cart software to help customers make good choices.

Successful strategies include:

Provide expansive descriptions, including all details and limitations.

Provide a variety of images from multiple angles, including front, back, side, and special detailing.

The description should include information regarding materials, special care instructions, and a user guide.

Sizing guides should be product specific. If an item tends to run small, advise customers to order a size larger. Whenever possible, offer recommendations based on the customer’s body shape, weight, and height.

Include product reviews provided by customers.

Experts indicate that the standard profit margin for an e-commerce order is 10 percent, while each return costs the company an average of $15. In layman’s terms, this means that if a $50 pair of jeans gets returned, the retailer ends up with a net loss of $10. With 25 to 40 percent of online purchases returned, e-commerce businesses are taking a huge hit to their profits. To combat size and color accuracy issues, many organizations are now investing in online tools that help the customer verify product dimensions or fit.

2) Your Customer Service Department Should Be Available to Answer Questions

Customers will often have questions that are not answered in the product description. Studies indicate that 44 percent of those consumers prefer to have those questions answered when in the middle of their purchase. Customer service representatives should be standing by, via phone call or chat, to assist in getting the answers they need. Easy access to support at each phase of the customer journey not only minimizes returns, but it also avoids customer frustration, which often leads to cart abandonment.

Retailers are also urged to train their customer service representatives to ask customers why they are returning an item. Recording this information will help identify trends and prevent further losses. Management should also monitor:

Customer feedback on products and service

Social media outlets

Customer forums

Implementing this strategy will help identify common consumer questions and minimize any miscommunication, regarding a product.

3) Inspect Orders for Quality and Correctness

A staggering 54 percent of all e-commerce returns are due to retailer error. Imagine the disappointment if you opened a package you have been waiting for, only to find the wrong item was shipped. This not only costs the company money, but it also leads to customer disappointment, further multiplying profit losses. To ensure order fulfillment accuracy, retailers are urged to implement a strict inspection process. To avoid human error, implement a two-step fulfillment process for outgoing orders, in which one employee pulls the merchandise, while another packages it.

4) Proper Packaging

No matter how streamlined your system for processing customer orders may be, accidents out of your control are bound to happen. In fact, it is estimated that 20 percent of all e-commerce returns are due to damaged or defective items. To prevent damage during shipment, and avoid other shipping errors, retailers must consider proper packaging as an integral part of the order fulfillment process.

Consider the following tips to prevent breakage and ensure the customer receives their product:

Care should be taken in the packaging of all items. Sturdy boxes that are appropriately sized for the item should always be used. The properly sized box should have just enough space for extra padding. Leaving too much extra space means the item could shift in transit.

Regardless of the delicacy or sturdiness of the item, always include padding in your packages. Cushioning material should vary depending upon the item being shipped. As a rule, bubble wrap is best for fragile items, while foam peanuts work best for those sturdy products.

Even the most perfectly packaged item sometimes meets its fate. To protect both you and the customer, obtain insurance from your shipping provider.

The timeless adage of the customer always being right can be interpreted as an unspoken courtesy to the patrons of your business. Keep your customers around by making them feel as if they are a priority. Return policies, especially in the instance of e-commerce, should mirror this philosophy. They should be a safety net for the consumer who has a problem, yet desires to remain a regular shopper with you.

Many customers may already feel as if they are going out on a limb to purchase without seeing the items in person. Do not make them gun shy with a hardline authoritative stance, which gives little to any positive options. In this day and age, considering the growing e-commerce landscape, they’ll go someplace else.

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Kevin Urrutia is the founder of Voy Media, a Facebook Advertising Agency based in New York. He aids businesses in effectively improving sales and conversion through the effective utilization of Facebook advertising. Voy Media is an expert in determining the best approach, coming up with a unique solution for each client.

There are numerous ways on how you can use Facebook for marketing purposes. One of the newer ways to do so is through Facebook Live, a feature of the social media network where a user can share videos in real time.

Facebook Live has the potential to be an effective way to do advertising on Facebook, especially in increasing engagement and brand awareness. Here are seven ways on how to achieve just that.

1. Go Behind the Scenes

One of the effective ways to make use of Facebook Live is taking your audience backstage, where the action happens. Use video campaigns where you can showcase how your video came to be. Your behind-the-scenes can help highlight how fun the brand is, especially when you feature the bloopers.

The goal of doing so is to help humanize your brand, helping your customers connect.

2. Broadcast a Live Event

You may also present special events on your Facebook Live streams such as your corporate holiday celebrations, a fun vacation, or any activity that your audience may find interesting. Facebook Live helps associate your brand to being fun and exciting, characteristics that can help give a positive attitude towards your business. And when this happens, customers are more likely to do business with you than on others that fail to connect with their customers on a personal level. You can look for 3rd party integrations for CS-Cart: a couple of plugins show your Facebook Wall, or even add a Live Chatbot that can help you with the inquiries once your buyers come in.

3. Host a Special Guest

Another great way to make use of Facebook Live is having a live conversation with a special guest. Working with known personalities has been practiced across different forms of promotional strategies, and these have proven to be effective. For the same reason, your Facebook Live marketing campaign can also find that inviting a known personality to appear on your live stream is an effective strategy.

Not only will this help drive views to your page, but would also bridge your brand to this guests’ network. It is a great way to tap more audience into your brand.

There are also many ways on how you can pull off a live stream with a guest, but one of the most common is hosting an interview about related topics. Just make sure that the personality that you would reach out to has a positive image. It’s best that you deal with personalities whose values reflect your own.

4. Showcase Live Product Demo

Another way to make use of Facebook Live is to do real-time product demonstrations. Not only is a live product demo a great way to tell a product’s function, but it also helps your users have a closer look at your products.

Setting up a live video of your product addresses the challenge of not seeing your products first hand in an e-commerce setup. Facebook Live can help provide a better view of your products for sale and help make tangible an otherwise intangible product offering. Since the audience will see how the product scales with another person, they will be able to confirm the actual characteristics of a product.

5. Unveil New Products

Another great way to make use of Facebook Live is by using it as the setting for unveiling new products. Of course, there are many channels that you can tap when you do a product launch, but Facebook Live is one that you should not take for granted.

You should also consider offering promotions related to your product launch exclusively for those who did watch the live feed as this helps incentivize those who do watch your Facebook Live videos.

6. Address Customer Questions

You can also hold a Q&A session with your audience. A live video directly engages your customers, and at the same time, helps solve their concerns, and strongly improves your engagement with your customers, because not only are you reaching out directly, but you are also actually solving their woes.

7. Run a Contest or Giveaways

Finally, you should consider hosting a contest or a giveaway activity exclusively to viewers of your live feed. Users appreciate freebies, and would very much welcome activities that would help them win just that. Just make sure that your contests are interesting enough, and that your giveaways are worthwhile.

Tap Facebook Live Now

Without a doubt, Facebook Live has unique potentials that businesses such as yours can take advantage. The above strategies are some of the effective ways that you can maximize Facebook Live for your business, and you should try them out now to have a first-hand experience on how doing this will help you achieve great results.

More useful eCommerce articles and infographics are coming your way. Follow CS-Cart on Facebook and Twitter not to miss them!

Not all social media channels are created equal and Facebook is one of those platforms that you just want to get right first time, particularly if you’re the owner of an e-business and thinking of advertising your goods online.

Getting the right content for a Facebook marketing strategy is not an impossible task, though plenty of hard work needs to go into it. With the right research and the right style in place, your eCommerce marketing campaign should start seeing some impressive results.

Facebook Ads

The first thing to bear in mind when building your marketing content for Facebook is that it is not a shopping site. People do not use Facebook to buy goods, they come on to catch up with friends, post about their lives and stalk ex-boyfriends. The shopping part happens when they see an advertisement that appeals to them or when a friend likes a particular page after buying a product themselves. The rate of buyer dropout is higher than with a search engine, where a browser is looking for a specific item and has more intention of buying.

With that in mind, Facebook ads need to be exactly right and aimed at a specific market. Adam Nowak, a Social Media Manager at Boom Essays, agrees. He said: “There are certainly tools that try and persuade visitors to Facebook to buy when they weren’t intending to purchase anything but creating a targeted advertising campaign will serve you well and takes away the uncertainty of who you’re aiming your goods at”.

Make It Visual

While a witty caption and powerful words will take you so far on Facebook, like most forms of marketing, it’s the visual image that draws in a potential customer.

You quite literally have milliseconds to stop the browser in their tracks and get them to read your ad campaign. Facebook itself encourages creative visual advertising with its Collection Ads. These handy posts allow for a larger scale picture followed by some product description. These ads are eye-catching and help draw your customer straight to your selling page.

Of course, you’re not limited to using still pictures and if you are able to create content using a short video, then this may play out with your customers even more.

Naturally, any photo or video must be original and engaging. It should not look like a last minute decision or an afterthought.

Use Tools to Get Your Writing Right

The online tools like Essayroo and UKWritings can be useful weapons in the fight against poor grammar, spelling errors and content that fails to flow properly.

Harness The Power Of Mobile Data

Too many Facebook adverts are geared towards desktop users, whereas statistics show us year on year that social media platforms are increasingly used by people with mobile devices. Make sure your content, graphics, and links work well and open properly on mobile devices. Users will not tolerate incompatible advertising and certainly won’t hang around for you to get it right.

Building content around your customer and not around your business is the key to creating a long-term, results-driven marketing strategy.

Once your advertising campaign has gone live and has been effective, make sure that those email addresses you’ve collected do not go to waste. As any marketer knows, retaining existing customers is much easier than recruiting new ones, so use those addresses to send promotions and updates.

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Focus on these three things and you will begin to see results. From now on it’s up to you to grow and adapt your eCommerce Facebook marketing strategy and adapt to changing trends, retaining returning customers and attracting new ones. Harness the power of Facebook and see how far your online business will go. By the way, CS-Cart shopping cart software has a widget that you can use to embed your e-commerce store to Facebook and convert customers even more effectively.

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Adelina Benson is an email marketer and writer at AcademicBrits. She develops marketing strategies, edits and proofreads company emails.

Online shopping can be incredibly convenient, but it can also be a frustrating task. Research has shown that online retailers suffer around a 70% rate of cart abandonment at the checkout from potential customers; our society has become accustomed to life’s interactions being seamless and easy, and so if online transactions become frustrating for any reason, people will simply abandon them. Here are some ways you can reduce the number of customers abandoning transactions at the last hurdle.

1. Don’t force people to create an account or ask too much information

Sometimes people simply click on the cart so that they can see how much they have ‘spent’ so far. By making them create an account simply to see the amount, they are immediately put off from carrying on any further. In the same way, offer a guest check out option—people will appreciate this if they are not regular customers of the site, as they won’t feel they are going to get bombarded by marketing material afterward, and a lot of people don’t like giving a lot of personal information out.

2. Show a breakdown of costs

Don’t leave customers wondering about the different fees included in the transaction, break it down for them and be as transparent as possible. “Research has shown that customers prefer it when the checkout process shows individual costs, including tax. Even if the shipping is free, show that it costs nothing to reiterate this, and make customers feel as though they are getting a good deal,” says Susan Labbe, content manager at OriginWritings.

3. Use a clear, multi-step checkout process

Although it may seem easier to simply present potential customers with one large form to fill out at the checkout, it has been proven that this actually pushes people away. A multi-step process, with small fields to complete on each page and a progress bar to show how many steps remain, is far more incentivising to see the transaction through to the end. Additionally, giving people the option to edit their basket during checkout, and including thumbnails of the products they have selected throughout payment, are simple steps that you can take to ensure the process is completed.

4. Make sure shipping prices are correct

“Nothing annoys people more than surprise delivery fees at the checkout,” says Branden Shulman, e-commerce manager at 1Day2Write and Write My X. “Be upfront about what cost applies to their location, so that people know how much they will need to add on to their purchases from the start”. Similarly, try and give an estimated waiting time that isn’t vague—saying 1 to 2 weeks isn’t clear enough!

5. Make them feel as though they are getting the best deal

Is it their first order? Is it a special time of year? Make people feel like they are getting the most for their money by offering vouchers and coupons for signing up, or for ordering within a specific time frame. People will often see if they can find a code online when they see the empty voucher field, and, when they can’t, abandon the transaction. Also, show the savings they have made at the checkout, as well as any free returns and guarantees that you offer.

6. Create a drop-down cart

Customers appreciate a seamless shopping experience. By allowing them to look at their cart without having to leave the page they are on, they will be less like likely to get frustrated and abandon their transaction. By allowing people to save their basket, too, encourages them to come back to it at a later date, rather than abandon it for good. Softwares like CS-Cart provide you with some great options.

7. Offer different payment options

Don’t limit yourself by only offering limited payment options. Try and get as many different, popular payments as is viable for your business—if you have gotten people as far as entering their payment details, don’t push them away at the last minute!

The age we live in means that we want things done quickly, easily, and as seamlessly as possible. Ultimately, if it too difficult, people will just abandon it, and there are so many options that if it doesn’t work in one place, there are plenty of other vendors that will deliver. With some simple adjustments, you could reduce the number of shoppers you lose dramatically.

More useful eCommerce articles and infographics are coming your way. Follow CS-Cart on Facebook and Twitter not to miss them!